Concrete Lunch

I deleted the Concrete Lunch Podcast account on LibSyn. I am still doing the Freestyle Podcast, but I haven’t done a Concrete Lunch podcast in a long time, and I feel like I don’t have a lot of time for it. I have some new podcasting ideas that I might try out, but decided to let this one die off. It was fun. But it’s more fun to do a podcast along with a friend or two. Whatever I do will have something to do with skateboarding. Or hell, maybe tabletop roleplaying games. I don’t know.

• Dementia sucks
• Friends are awesome
• Skateboarding is great
• Having great professionals to help you face life’s challenges is the best
• The human organism is amazingly resilient, but ultimately it will fail
• Friends are awesome again, because you can’t say that enough
• The world is beautiful and sad and amazing and happy and brutal and kind

Well, after really digging G+ for a while, Google revealed today that it is discontinuing the service. It seems they had a data breach with G+, and based on the fact that it didn’t really catch on like they wanted they’re going to kill it off.

I like G+ because I didn’t see very cockeyed bullshit idea that everyone posted like on Facebook. I could join, for instance, a Traveller RPG community and only see that stuff. It was nice to, for the most part, interact with people without finding out they are nuts.

Anyway, a lot of the RPG gaming communities from G+ are moving to https://mewe.com/.  MeWe is a social network that seems to value privacy a bit more than others. Their business model is different. It’s so different that I wonder if it is really viable. I hope it is. I think I may spend some money with them just to help them out. One cool thing — you can’t see much about a person there without actually being one of their connections. I like that. Anyway, I signed up a while back, and now I’m going to give it a real shot and see how it goes.

Added Beto for Senate stickers to my main riders today.  Beto is traveling the state meeting everyone, like a good punk should. I hope he wins. Going to be tough.

I’m sitting in the same hospital room we had in November 2016. My mom fractured her hip in a fall yesterday. Looks like surgery this afternoon. She had a good night. It sure is hard to see her like this, but that’s the road we’re on. It’s going to be a rough week for her, and a rough few weeks after that, but we have all the resources we need to get the hip repaired and rehabbed as well as possible. Life sure is weird, but it’s still good. It’s good just to be in the room with her. We need to get this hip fixed, and get her back on her feet before she loses too much muscle.

I’m at Boston Logan airport, about to fly home from the pleasant summer temperatures up here to the scalding horrible 105 F at 7pm temps of home, in Dallas. I’m not really looking forward to it. I want to see my mom, and our cats, but the notion of dealing with the next month or more of bullshit high temperatures does’t thrill me.  I realize that winters up here are miserable too. I get that. But it’s not winter. When it’s 105 in the shade at 7pm I don’t want to go out and skate. I don’t want to go to aikido (the dojo will be hot as hell). So I guess I’ll just lay around reading this week.

There’s a lot of summer left at the library. I have a lot to do, and I feel somewhat refreshed after a week of vacation. Spent the week on Cape Cod. Went to the beach once. That’s as much as I like. Not a big fan of the beach. I love being by the ocean. I just never feel very comfortable at the beach. I burn easily, so I’m also covered with sun screen. My lower back doesn’t enjoy sitting in a low beach chair that is half sunk in the sand. So an afternoon at the beach is OK. I don’t mind taking one for the team.

We took a ferry ride over to Martha’s Vineyard. There were lots of white people there. Lots of little shops to go in. Places to drink. Not really my thing. It was hot that day. Not Texas hot, but if it’s 80 degrees, humid, and the sun is out, it feels really hot. So honestly, we weren’t that stoked about Martha’s Vineyard. The next day when the family went to Nantucket (to the beach again), we stayed on Cape Cod and took a drive around. Went to an old Meeting Hall in Barnstable. It was actually kind of cool. I like stuff like that. It was nice to drive around with my wife, talk, laugh, and chill.  Then we went home to the big house the family was renting, grilled some food, ate by the pool (in the wonderful cool shade — it was beautifu) and relaxed. The house we were renting was great. Hanging there by the pool in the late afternoon was really nice. I got some reading done.

Friday we went for a bike ride, on a great bike path on Cape Cod that was built under the Rails to Trail initiative. Great trail. Really a fun thing to do.

Well, the airport is fairly chill right now. I got a shitty C boarding pass, so I’m sure I’ll be stuck in a middle seat for the 4 hour flight. Oh well. First world problems. I’ll be home soon enough.

Just another social media editorial.

I feel like Google + is a much better platform for sharing and enjoying stuff online that Facebook or Google. Maybe it’s just not as popular with the fascists, morons, assholes, and goons? I don’t know. Maybe its the whole “circles” of friends you can create there? I’m sure if I looked I could find some real jerkoffs there, but it seems easier to ignore them. Sure, Google is a big intrusive company, but at least they seem to have their act together. I’ve tried https://mewe.com , and I like it, but it seems like it has too much to overcome in Facebook. I fear its days are numbered.

Now, sure, it’s important to know that people like that exist, but are we really in danger of not knowing that if we don’t read every disturbing thing they scrawl on Twitter? I don’t think we are. It’s not so much a matter of isolating myself, but more like being selective about that I allow to affect my blood pressure.